Arendt and Individualism PDF

Arendt and Individualism
Author(s): GEORGE KATEB

Source: Social Research, Vol. 61, No. 4, Sixtieth Anniversary 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our
Past (WINTER 1994), pp. 765-794
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971059
Accessed: 27-03-2019 05:04 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Social Research
This content downloaded from 203.199.213.66 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 05:04:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Arendt and
Individualism . ' BY GEORGE KATEB
1 he recent publication of hitherto unpublish

by Hannah Arendt must have some effec
understand her contribution to political theory.
archive some of the specimens that have been
the power, in their richness, both to re-orient u
us as we seek to come to terms with one of the gr
theorists of the century. One effect of these writ
us back with new eyes to the Arendt books we
and thought we understood, while another effect
wonder at the apparent discrepancy between
published and what she withheld (either kept
confined to those who heard her presentation)
theoretical issues.
I experienced both these effects in reading the part of

"Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought
After the French Revolution" (1954) that Jerome Kohn edited
and published in Social Research (in Spring 1990), under the
title "Philosophy and Politics" (Arendt, 1990).1 (The whole
manuscript was publicly delivered but never published by
Arendt.) Thanks to Professor Kohn, I have been able to read
the full manuscript, and it is continuously absorbing. But it is
especially the printed part that helps as it were to re-open the
pages of earlier essays and such works as Rahel Varnhagen and
The Human Condition; and on the specific matter of the
connection between citizenship and Socratic examination and
self-examination, it establishes a large gap between itself and
later work Arendt chose to publish, especially "Civil Disobedi-
ence," "Thinking and Moral Considerations," and The Life of
SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1994)
766 SOCIAL RESEARCH
the Mind. Just by itself, the pri

invites us to go beyond the s
citizenship and begin to recon
Arendt's relation to individuali
Politics" helps to sensitize us to th
said and done, is a stalwart advocate of a certain kind of
individualism. Yet the kind she advocates in work she
published, powerful as it is, may strike us as unduly limit
whereas the unpublished contributions to alternative, m
insistent individualisms do not always fit with her publis
version, even apart from the specific matter of Socra
citizenship, and are richly suggestive.
"Philosophy and Politics" is a marvelous fragment. It is rich

in thought about Socrates. Arendt seems to be unreservedly
his side, not only as a model thinker but as a model citizen. I
the course of saying why he was a great citizen, Arendt mak
a fine contribution to conceptualizing a kind of individualism
The trouble is that the Socrates of "Philosophy and Politics"
substantially unlike the Socrates presented in Arendt's pu
lished work. This means, in turn, that the kind of individua
ism found in "Philosophy and Politics" is, in some ma
respects, at odds with Arendt's characteristic kind of individ
alism. There is some common ground, but the discrepanc
are noteworthy. If Arendt's characteristic individualism
agonistic, the individualism of "Philosophy and Politics"
closer to modern democratic individuality.
Arendt takes up Socrates in the last part of the long
manuscript, which deals throughout with the antagonism of
displayed by philosophy towards political life. In the earl
part of the manuscript, Arendt stakes out a claim. If won
instigates philosophy in most of its endeavors, which "a
connected and remain inspired by one original wonder bef
and gratitude for the miracles of man and earth and
ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 767
Universe" (Arendt, 1954, p. 3), politica

originates in antagonism towards its ver
Philosophers crave "stability, perman
(Arendt, 1954, p. 4). But the realm of
constituted by the opposite of these deside
futile deeds in a helplessly changing wor
bestow contemplation on such confusion a
radically separates thought and action, an
have followed his example. Whatever
Aristotle's teaching, he at least stays
unphilosophical Greek opinion in praising
restates Aristotle's position, however, she a
does not appear in her published work. S
say merely that thought may precede, g
justify action, she also holds that thought a
by their common dependence on speech.
that action and thought (not only, not espe
thought) are closer to each other than eith
in the whole range of human activities
consummately human. When properly im
action, thought is not merely instrumental
"truth" (Arendt, 1954, p. 6). "To be aware
I can disclose thought and through thinkin
both move in the essentially human medium
to be aware of being human in an articu
(Arendt, 1954, p. ad 6).
Among the Greeks, then, was "this extrao
speech as harboring in itself the whole
human existence" (Arendt, 1954, p. 10).
phy's influence, we have become used to
antagonism between thought and action,
thinking ... to acting" (Arendt, 1954, p. 11). In her
manuscript, Arendt dwells on the historical varieties of
philosophical diminishment or denaturing of action. At the
very end (in the printed part on Socrates), Arendt urges the
appearance of a "true political philosophy" (Arendt, 1990, p.
768 SOCIAL RESEARCH
103), a project that she was to d

reached its greatest and most orig
Condition, published four years lat
She means, in her closing rema
reconciliation between philosophy
doubtful that she in fact remained committed to that ideal.
Her famous work is a philosophy that wars on philosophy (as

distinct from the activity of thinking) in the name of action,
as if the opposition of philosophy to action were inveterate.
Be that as it may, she makes it clear that political life is
deserving of wonder every bit as much as all the other
aspects of existence. She says: "If philosophers, despite their
necessary estrangement from the everyday life of human
affairs, were ever to arrive at a true political philosophy they
would have to make the plurality of man, out of which arises
the whole realm of human affairs- in its grandeur and
misery- the object of their thaumadzein" (Arendt, 1990, p.
103).
It is noteworthy, however, that in the same year, but on a
different occasion ("Concern with Politics in Recent European
Philosophical Thought"), she indicates glancingly what one
political source of wonder is. She says that speechless horror at
political evil is "in many ways related to the speechless wonder
of gratitude from which the questions of philosophy spring"
(Arendt, 1994, p. 445). 2 The remark is tantalizing. How can
horror and gratitude be related? Clearly she thought that
genuine political action should instigate wonder as intensely as
political evil does; that genuine political action, when properly
philosophized, could inspire gratitude as much as anything
else in existence. Still, she worked alone or almost alone when
she worked to reconcile philosophy and politics. Yet in the
printed part of the manuscript- we should say, in the part at
last printed- Arendt pictures a philosopher (an unprofes-
sional philosopher consumed by thinking) who tried, in the
practice of his philosophy, to reconcile philosophy and politics.
The hero is Socrates, the creature of speechless wonder trying
to share (let us call it) the possibility of wo

citizens. I would now like to go over som
Socrates whom Arendt presents only in thi
she withheld from publication.
In "Philosophy and Politics," Arendt's em

tially different from "Thinking and Mo
(Arendt, 1971). It is on Socrates as a midwif
of others, performing the "maieutic" fun
Socrates' gadfly qualities, but transforms
unforthcoming irritant into the one who wa
more truthful; and she does not mention at all Socrates the
sting-ray, whose questioning paralyzes people and prevents
them from going thoughtlessly through their motions. Instead
she wants us to understand Socrates as engaged in the labor of
helping his fellow citizens speak their mind and thus deliver
themselves of what lies inside themselves, awaiting expressive
birth and realization. Arendt see Socrates as committed to
releasing the opinion or doxa that every individual carries bu

cannot quite send out without assistance. The city is thus mad
up of speakers learning to speak and helping one another
speak; the real city is a city in words. In "Philosophy a
Politics," Arendt produces her loveliest utopia.
Socrates' method was dialogue, which Arendt makes
synonymous with dialetic (Arendt, 1990, p. 79). Unlike Pla
Socrates did not consider dialogue to be the opposite o
political persuasion or rhetoric. Actually, Arendt's Socrates w
trying to substitute dialogue for rhetoric, the voice o
friendship for the unpersonal and artificial voice of pub
speakers. Socrates' aim was to spread the voice of friendsh
but his revised version of friendship- outward from
original personal place to public places. "Socrates tried to mak
friends out of Athens's citizenry" (Arendt, 1990, p. 82). In
untypical mood, Arendt is willing to entertain with sympath
770 SOCIAL RESEARCH
the possibility that public life can

absorbing the spirit of an essenti
To be sure, she knows that Socrat
paid, or had to pay a price. Indee
on her admired teacher Karl Ja
(even if publicly delivered) p
"Philosophy and Politics," and r
has anything to do with poli
anywhere else). She says:
'communication'- the term as we

ence-has its roots not in the public
personal encounter of I and Tho
dialogue is closer to the original
dialogue of one with oneself in soli
the same token, it contains less spe
than almost any relationship in
(Arendt, 1994, p. 443).
But she does not make this crit

Politics." The omission is all the
is intent on applauding Socrates'
of Athens's citizenry." This p
understandable
in a polis whose life consisted of an intense and uninterrupted

contest of all against all, of aei aristeuein, ceaselessly showing
oneself to be the best of all. In this agonal spirit, which
eventually was to bring the Greek city states to ruin because it
made alliances between them well nigh impossible and poisoned
the domestic life of the citizens with envy and mutual hatred
(envy was the national vice of ancient Greece), the common-weal
was constantly threatened (Arendt, 1990, p. 82).
The praise of Socrates' citizenly mission corresponds to a

highly unusual (and unpublished) disparagement of the
un-Socratized polis, and of the agon itself, which becomes
odiously Hobbesian.
In an uncanny resemblance to Emerson's views, Arendt
reads Socrates as closely linking the dialogue of friendship with
the attainment of truth. Truthful indi

citizens. What is the truth involved? Arendt's answer seems
only partly Greek and mostly Nietzschean. (As Heidegge

does, Arendt often uses Greek things to advance existential
ism.) She says, in a beautifully re- worked ideal of perspectiv-
ism, that Socrates endeavored, with the help of everyone to
whom he spoke, to uncover the particular truth that an
person carries along with him or her in the form of that
person's opinion or doxa. Doxa derives from dokei moi, whic
means "what appears to me," "the world as it opens itself to
me." The world "opens up differently to every man, according
to his position in it" (Arendt, 1990, p. 80). A doxa is not
however, either "subjective fantasy" or "arbitrariness," even
though it is not "something absolute and valid for all" (Arendt,
1990, p. 85). The world becomes a common world when
everyone acknowledges that it is the same world that opens up
differently to all, and further (and relatedly) acknowledges
that both "you and I are human"- that is, that every doxa
deserves to be spoken and heard.
Being neither fantasy nor arbitrariness, one's doxa is what
one is peculiarly fit or enabled to see and say. One's doxa i
what one is, in one's individual uniqueness; and to be able to
assert one's opinion is the reason to want an opportunity to
show oneself to others, while patiently allowing others to show
themselves similarly. Arendt attributes to Socrates the convic-
tion that no one should presume to guess what another
person's doxa is, and that no one "can know by himself an
without further effort the inherent truth of his own opinion"
(Arendt, 1990, p. 81). Hence the need for the maieutic
procedure. One needs help, as an adult, to individuate oneself.
The problem is that citizens, as given, do not assist one another
in the mutual cause of eliciting truth. Arendt endorses
Socrates' self-estimate that he is indispensable to the integrity
of the city. She is careful to deny, however, that Socrates ever
aspired to tell the truth, philosophical truth, to others, whether
or not Socrates believed there was such. Sustaining Arendt is
772 SOCIAL RESEARCH
the thought she published earlie

Existential Philosophy?" In appare
she says: "For Jaspers, any ontolog
Being really is is a falling awa
individual categories of being. Th
such a falling away would be that i
which can only be maintained if
Being really is" (Arendt, 1994, p. 1
Truth, which, in any case, can nev
that the Truth can never be known
Socrates "wanted to make the
delivering each of the citizens of th
81). His dialectic- the dialogue bet
equals- is at the service of the p
Socrates, not Arendt) would call
tion, oddly, consists in the coexist
each in some sense true. Rather th
Arendt retains the concept of tr
desirability of coexistent and diver
means that in speaking truthfully,
say what is really on one's mind
and events and conditions in the co
barely or incompletely) oneself. D
multiply the world and make it m
was Socrates' constant aim. Arendt makes no room for citizens
who try to influence one another: her concept of doxa implies

such a close tie between one's opinion and one's person that it
is difficult to imagine breaking out of oneself, except falsely.
More precisely, only when citizens are not true to themselves,
are not trying to deliver themselves of their respective truths,
can they affect one another. That is, they can corrupt but not
improve one another doctrinally. What citizens truly learn
from one another is how much difference exists in their world.
Of course, Arendt does not explicitly say what I have just said.
But I do not see what else could follow from what she does
explicitly say. No wonder she withheld

Politics."
Yet bearing diverse doxai, citizens can become friends. Each

person is a world, but worlds can understand each other and
want to live together. Seeing the world from the other person's
point of view is what friends do for each other. "This kind of
understanding ... is the political kind of insight par excellence"
(Arendt, 1990, p. 84). Without censure, even without
scepticism, Arendt attributes to Socrates the thought, the hope,
that "the political function of the philosopher was to help
establish this kind of common world, built on the understand-
ing of friendship, in which no rulership is needed" (Arendt,
1990, p. 84). Thoreau, whom she later ("Civil Disobedience,"
1970) tries to exclude from the pantheon of citizens, did not
express it better.
Arendt says that Socrates relied on two "insights" in carrying
out his maieutic function: know thyself, and the need to be in
agreement with oneself (Arendt, 1990, p. 84). In subsequent
published writings, Arendt is preoccupied with the latter
insight, but it plays an important role in "Philosophy and
Politics" as well. In this work, first of all, she equates knowing
oneself with "knowing what appears to me." "For mortals the
important thing is to make doxa truthful, to see in every doxa
truth and to speak in such a way that the truth of one's opinion
reveals itself to oneself and to others" (Arendt, 1990, pp.
84-5). Thus, one's truth is the only truth for oneself. With the
friend-philosopher's help, each can aspire to know himself or
herself and then be truthfully disclosed. But if one needs help
from a friend to know oneself, one must also go inside oneself.
One must submit to examination, but one must also practice
self-examination. Of course, the world affords many routes of
escape from self-examination, but sooner or later even the
most active or the most villainous person will have at least a
moment's solitude. Arendt sees Socrates as encouraging a taste
for solitude among his fellow citizens so that one may want to
live with oneself and also be able to do so.
774 SOCIAL RESEARCH
In Arendt's view, the chief cr

speaks truthfully is to be in ag
contradict oneself. The fear of
from the ability to "talk with
two" (Arendt, 1990, p. 85). In
Arendt refers to the developme
of a practiced internal dialogue
not kill, even under conditions
that you cannot possibly want to
(Arendt, 1990, p. 87). After all,
from whom I cannot depart, who
I am welded together" (Arendt,
If these thoughts are famil
subsequent published writings,
The possibility of developing a
"Philosophy and Politics," is "
politics." Ordinarily, Arendt
margins of political life, to
emergency or extremity. Even in
and Politics," in a publicly deliv
she says that "for man- insofar a
essential but nevertheless margin
p. 443). Why, then, is secular
relevance?" The reason is that the Greeks understood the
public-political realm as the scene in which "men attain their
full humanity, their full reality as men, because they not only
are (as in the privacy of the household) but appear" (Arendt,
1990, p. 87). Appearance is reality; it is the model or
intelligible face of reality. Therefore, each should follow
Socrates' advice: "Be as you would like to appear to others,"
which Arendt renders as "appear to yourself as you would
want to appear if seen by others" (Arendt, 1990, p. 87). Learn
to know yourself so that you may learn to live with yourself.
Solitude is as indispensable as conscience and is the source of
conscience. So far from being "antipolitical," solitude, just
because it is the precondition of conscience, is "the necessary
condition for the good functioning of the p

p. 89).
Though an end in itself, learning to speak one's doxa
truthfully, without self-contradiction, is also, and at the same
time, a precondition of acting decently. In Arendt's formula-
tion: "Only someone who has had the experience of talking
with himself is capable of being a friend, of acquiring another
self. The condition is that he be of one mind with himself, in
agreement with himself . . . because somebody who contradicts
himself is unreliable" (Arendt, 1990, p. 85). Arendt thus
conflates the delight of a society of truthful friends and the
decency of a society of conscientious citizens.
The elevation of the centrality of conscience in "Philosophy
and Politics" is striking in the context of Arendt's whole work.
Yet more striking is the espousal of solitude- not for
philosophers alone, but for everyone. The fact is that Arendt
delivers in this unpublished piece an espousal of solitude that
is not confined to its good conscientious effects, just as her
espousal of speaking one's doxa truthfully is not confined to its
citizenly effects but also generously accommodates its individ-
ualist significance. Solitude is the opening into human plurality
as such. Arendt announces the theme: "even if I were to live
entirely by myself I would, as long as I am alive, live in the
condition of plurality" (Arendt, 1990, p. 86). The more
absolute the solitude, the more delivered is the person to inner
plurality. In "Philosophy and Politics," however, Arendt
identifies this plurality solely with the dialogue "between the
two who I am." In another unpublished work, "On the Nature
of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding," dating from
no later than 1954, she articulates a richer conception of inner
plurality, even if it is less directly relevant to secular
conscience.
Now, Arendt does say in "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"

that in solitude "we are always two-in-one" (Arendt, 1994, p.
358), but there are more resonant formulations as well. Inner
plurality seems to become inner multiplicity. I cannot insist on
776 SOCIAL RESEARCH
this point; Arendt does not elabor

alone, one is "therefore potential
(Arendt, 1994, p. 359); "being tog
therefore being "with everybod
would like to think that Arendt is
idea, intrinsic to democratic indiv
inwardly various, full of though
desires, reveries, insights, and o
come from one center, but from t
oneself, in Whitman's word from
wants such multiplicity to serve
others and other things: we must
to some extent, of that which sur
too disposed to ignore or cond
Whitman thought that inner mu
tudes, had perforce to be a cond
Actual persons "contradict" on
realization of desires and insig
dominate all the rest of that perso
one's inner multiplicity, one does not so much enact
contradiction as admit that one is capable, or almost capable, of
being or doing just about anything. Such an admission may
create connection. The connectedness sung by Whitman is one
of the greatest of all visions of connectedness, and it is
intensely individualistic and intensely dependent on the
practices of solitude.
Arendt remains devoted, in the writings she did not publish,
to the idea that the true inner life is a dialogue between me and
myself. Of course, she is perfectly aware that the silent mind
encloses far more elements than two voices conversing. But she
wants the inner life to be moving outward, not dwelling in
itself and exploring itself, not sounding itself to its depths. It is
not clear to me to what extent Arendt's whole view of the best
inner life is shaped by Socrates' inner voice of negation and

prohibition; but that Socrates' daimonion contributes a general
tendency to Arendt's conceptualization is likely. Socrates could
say that his inner voice came to him from

that it was a divine guide. On the other han
give us a phenomenology of inwardness,
passivities, and of the sameness of its app
well as the abrupt occurrences in it of fo
ingredients. But restricting ourselves to her
dialogue of the two-in-one, we are led to as
am, how do I identify the one other tha
converse with me? Is the other a gift or a t
something even more mysterious?
Arendt does not take her theory of solitud
direction. In "On the Nature of Totalitarianism," she has
another way of praising it. The gift she says solitude confers is
that it "prepares us for certain outstanding forms of human
rapport, such as friendship and love, that is for all rapport
which transcends the established channels of human commu-
nication" (Arendt, 1994, pp. 358-59). If one learns to bear
one's own company, one is equipped for companionship.
Arendt's suggestions are tonally and substantively different
from those she makes concerning the relation between
speaking one's doxa truthfully (thanks in part to solitary
self-examination) and being a citizenly friend in "Philosophy
and Politics." The two writings share, however, a praise for
solitude as part of everyone's life, and therefore say something
missing from Arendt's published work. In such praise is found,
I think, some aspects of Arendt's later and uncompleted
attempts to produce a theory of judging, where judging is
taken to be the capacity to anticipate what others will think on
some public matter and try to see why they think as they do
and also to see whether in their place one would think, or have
to think, as they do. Judging facilitates either agreement or
mutual respect among those who disagree. (The faculty of
judgment never dares to claim knowledge of what it is like to
be someone else.) Arendt's unpublished thought about solitude
opens a rich line of inquiry.
Nevertheless, I am persuaded that at its most suggestive,
778 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Arendt's defense of solitude

examination is deliberately limite
is that solitude will prove too
maintained as an inner fortress w
hostile world. "Self- thinking," a
book, Rahel Varnhagen (dating fr
can make a person think that sol
tion" can re-create the world an
own mind, or save oneself from
conditions by providing a sel
sanctuary. Only late in life d
Jewishness as an unalterable fac
solidarity with other Jews. Until
a lie, the lie of denial. One main
in constant introspection, looking
bore none of the characteristics for which the world
condemned Jews, the self that could also re-arrange the wor
by continually trying to anticipate it or by re-describing an
re-interpreting it so that its reality is dissolved in men
constructions. Whether animated by pleasure or fear- or
painfully transforming itself into the semblance of pleasure
"introspection and its hybrids engender mendacity" (Aren
1974, p. 11). (In The Human Condition, Arendt renews h
indictment of introspection by yoking it to a loss of comm
sense and a common world [Arendt, 1958, pp. 280-94, 29
Arendt wants Rahel "to consent to herself," as Arendt want
everyone to consent to himself or herself (Arendt, 1974, p.
Such consent is refused when one chooses to live one's real life
with oneself, inside oneself. One suffers the illusion of
individual infinitude (to use an Emersonian word). "Man's
autonomy becomes hegemony over all possibilities" (Arendt,
1974, p. 10). Arendt says: "For the possibilities of being
different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated
oneself, there are no longer any particular choices. There is
only one aim: always, at any given moment, to be different
from what one is; never to assert oneself, but with infinite
pliancy to become anything else, so long

(Arendt, 1974, p. 13). Arendt even manag
way in which the detachment that intros
may lead to an indefinite receptivity:
freedom from all bias was translated i
virtually everything; everything became
dom from ties was expressed in a senseles
(Arendt, 1974, p. 34). Such receptivity indic
particular historically conditioned world
34).
We should notice nevertheless that in a published essay from
1954, "Understanding and Politics" (which formed the first
part of the manuscript, "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"),
Arendt writes a memorable tribute to the power of the solitary
imagination. This is a rare theme in Arendt, as rare as the
practice of it by Arendt is abundant. Imagination is under-
standing, "the gift of the "understanding heart," and consists
in the effort to penetrate the "particular darkness of the
human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds
everything that is real" (Arendt, 1994, p. 322). Understanding
does not tire because it trusts that imagination "will catch at
least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth"
(Arendt, 1994, p. 322). In words that seem to carry with them
an at least implicit rejection of the more extreme aspersions
cast on introspection in Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt calls
imagination "the only moral compass we have" and trium-
phantly concludes:
Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper

perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at
a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without
bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of
remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is
too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This
distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to others is
part of the dialogue of understanding, for whose purposes
direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere
knowledge erects artificial barriers (Arendt, 1994, p. 323).
780 SOCIAL RESEARCH
The essay ends, however, not wit

of receptivity as made possible b
some deepened understanding of
to confine imagination and burden it with an almost
superhuman task: "We are contemporaries only so far as our
understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth,
even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try
to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of
totalitarianism" (Arendt, 1994, p. 323). She had already
discharged this duty of imagination in The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951) and was to undertake it again in
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
The praise of imagination, for which solitude is indispens-
able, is even less characteristic of Arendt than praise of
solitude for everyone, not just philosophers. Arendt feels
constrained to limit the role of solitude in the attempt at
self-acquaintance, and the role of solitude in fostering the
imaginative understanding of otherness. I have been assuming
that these uses of solitude are not only some of the principal
hallmarks of many kinds of individualism but are, in the
theory of democratic individuality as taught by Emerson,
Thoreau, and Whitman (with Socrates as a major ancestor), the
reason for being, or trying to be or become, an individual. As I
have said, Arendt may be seen in her main work as a theorist
and exponent of a certain kind of individualism- namely,
agonisitic individualism. The reflections found in some of the
writings I have discussed, whether published or withheld by
her, go quite far in a different direction from the agon as the
source and scene of becoming an individual. These writings
value solitude as a preparation for communicating one's
opinion and attending to the opinions of one's fellows and
friends. But they do not value solitude for the transactions
whereby one looks into oneself for the sake of oneself first; but
if for oneself, in the Emersonian spirit, then necessarily for the
sake of the world. The Emersonian teaching is that one is
kindred to all externality. Self-understanding and the under-
standing of the world mutually intensify ea

content to understand and be understood by
and friends, who do not comprise the whole
imaginative understanding. Nor is unders
trators of systematic evil the sole extraordi
imagination should set itself, great as that t
If the agon is not explicitly at stake in the
can find Arendt's sympathy for solitude,
and imaginative understanding of othe
sympathy nevertheless limited? Why not ce
does, inner multiplicity even to the point o
contradiction? The reason, as we have seen, is that Arendt
insists that a good friend and citizen must be in agreement with
himself; otherwise he is unreliable. He must fear the
reproaches of conscience if he is to act decently. But surely a
cultivated awareness of one's inner contradiction, one's inner
multiplicity, is not a preparation for acting out contradictory
desires and reveries. Actually, it may act to inhibit anything
ungenerous or destructive. Arendt's comprehensive fear is that
a retreat inside oneself will issue from a practiced introspec-
tion. It certainly may, under Stoic auspices. But there are other
auspices- say, the Emersonian ones- and hence other possible
consequences. Arendt goes so far as to say that we become
individual not in solitude (where we are always two-in-one) but
"through and only through the company of others" (Arendt,
1994, p. 358). Each is one only when called out of inwardness
and compelled to cohere and be integral in response to the
presence of others. I want to say, yes and no. We must present
a united front so as to function. But a good deal more is kept
back than is ever expressed; and what is expressed is often not
one's truth, but one's obedience to or interpretation of the
requirements of one's role or position. Much of the time, when
one acts, one is not acting as oneself. As her book on Rahel
Varnhagen and other writings show, Arendt seems to believe
that each of us has an essence; that is what it means to be an
individual. To be sure, "who somebody essentially is, we know
782 SOCIAL RESEARCH
only after he is dead" (Arendt,

thinks each has a core and that th
action, especially political action.
one is: only others know oneself, a
all this as incident to action. Kn
mean, for Arendt, absolute self-k
she is not intent to defend ag
nevertheless has action in the w
Alternatively, we can surmise that
mystery that inheres in each indiv
potency to self-exploration is to ma
To attribute too much potency to
in the form of an empathy that
they know themselves (or wish to
them directly in dialogue, is not
wicked. It effaces the finally una
persons. It is world-destroying
imaginary for the obdurately actua
Solitude may prepare us for "cer
human rapport, such as friendsh
rapport which transcends the est
communication" (Arendt, 1994, p
say, however, that superior to
"perhaps even more primary rela
the realm they constitute, springin
human plurality" (Arendt, 1994
unagonistic writings, the politi
transendence. "Relationships and co
aspects, are as irrevocable as nat
The lesson is driven home by Ar
danger in solitude is of losing one's
being together with everybody,
everybody. This has been the
philosopher . . . who needs solitu
condition . . . this interest has natu
with tyrannies where action is
(Arendt, 1994, pp. 359-60). We can answ

greatest philosophers have sympathized wi
many of the greatest have detested them.
human inconsistency between favoring solitu
everybody else and being ready to extend a w
who proceed to crush public life. Those who
general human achievement are often am
protest or resist or at least find ways of not
the tyrant, even if they normally abstain fr
of course I am only repeating what Arend
implies in her praise of Socrates.
Even in the writing she withheld, then,
the untypical views she offers. The pro
political philosophy, crystallized in The H
guides her modifications and sets her limits.
we ask why there is a discrepancy between
her unpublished views, we must first say
lished views are not unequivocal. Solitud
self-acquaintance is praised but kept unde
imagination, one of the products of solitu
circumscribed. Then we can go on to say
theoretical wish is to make political life a
thoughtful audience, and to do so by t
urgently and so distinctively human as to be
is no ulterior motive lying behind that wish
Arendt's philosophy, the manifestation of
individuation) and the best form that an
attachment to the world as home can take.
of a certain kind of individualism, Arendt has to criticize or
praise only guardedly several features of other kinds of
individualism, whether democratic or subjectivist or even
existentialist.
For all the criticism one can make of Arendt's contributions
to the idea of individualism and despite her permanent

distance from the aspiration to democratic individuality, her
withheld writings together with some occasional (but not
784 SOCIAL RESEARCH
salient) published pieces make a g

about individualism in general,
she could not endorse.
I have said that some of the writings Arendt chose not to

publish contain ideas significantly different from any found in
her published work. At the same time the unpublished writings
may send us back to the work we already know with eyes made
more sensitive. The interest of this paper, Arendt's relation to
individualism, would be served by a careful and thorough
re-examination of her treatment of individualism in her main
works. I can offer here only a few remarks.
The Human Condition gives the fullest account of agonistic
individualism. Arendt works to show that the Greek city-state
was "the most individualistic and least conformable body
politic known to us" (Arendt, 1958, p. 43). The citizen, by
acting in the company of his peers, attains to worldly reality
because he reveals himself to more than a few, each of whom
regards him from a different point of view. The life of
intimacy or domesticity can never draw out one's identity
because these settings cannot replace "the reality rising out of
the sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude
of spectators" (Arendt, 1958, p. 57). One is everything others
truthfully say about oneself, when one has been observed in
circumstances that induced one to stand up and speak out on a
matter common to all. The public realm was the only setting
"where men could show who they really and inexchangeably
were"; it was "reserved for individuality." Hence, every citizen
"had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show
through unique deeds or achievements that he was best of all"
(Arendt, 1958, p. 41).
Arendt's individualism is agonistic because it is competitive;
but unlike many other modes of competition, public political
competition is public-spirited: it seeks a common good. One's
own good --ultimately, one's immortal f

able apart from that of the city. One's rew
be secret or private. To outshine others is n
Agonistic individualism is cooperative; its l
of the setting that has allowed one to achie
an individual. One can be oneself, howeve
group, amid a plurality; there one live
unique being among equals" (Arendt, 195
no individuality without a pluralist equality
in this connection is Arendt's stinging crit
"What Is Existential Philosophy?" (1948).
positing a Self in isolation whose "fall" is o
with his own kind in the world" (Arendt
Self in isolation is preoccupied with it
preoccupation guarantees "that all that m
myself." This Self is "the total opposite of
"nothing but his own nothingness"; "being-
place of being human" (Arendt, 1994, 180
only in passing that anything good can
mindedness- as, for example, a greater love
susceptibility to the wonder of all thing
precarious. She says that only Nietzsche
follower) affirm life or human existence as
as "a point of departure" (Arendt, 1994,
But things are never simple with Arend
on individuality in The Human Condition in
not easily contribute to the advocacy of ag
if they contribute at all. I do not say that
respects the individualist ideas found in th
,which I have already discussed. Rather,
certain thoughts that are fundamenta
course, peculiarly) Emersonian. What is
Emerson's defense of solitude and introsp
defense of sympathetic identification wit
general Emersonian concern with each ind
The Human Condition has passages that are c
786 SOCIAL RESEARCH
cordial to infinitude than Rahel

than even the withheld writings.
Arendt powerfully imparts the
greater than anything he or she
qualities, gifts, or talents. The act
and thus exceeds definition. We ca
living essence of the person" (Aren
than the person can exhaust his
action. We can say "what" an ind
or her capacities and attainments;
is is either scarcely possible or imp
of who the speaker and doer une
plainly visible, retains a curious in
efforts toward unequivocal verba
p. 181). Arendt is driven to an o
uses oracles as an analogy: "the m
comes to pass in the same manner
manifestations of ancient oracles,
tus, 'neither reveal nor hide in wor
(Arendt, 1958, p. 182). The "who"
but the person's fellows and equa
intimates?) It is each person's uniq
residual and inextinguishable m
person's uniqueness transcends th
(Arendt, 1958, p. 210). Each of u
by the repetition of theatrical mim
play oneself properly. A writer ca
and perhaps distill one's essence.
story does not contain the truth f
acted: "What the storyteller na
hidden from the actor himself, at
or caught in the consequences, bec
ness of his act is not in the stor
stories are the inevitable results of
the storyteller who perceives and
1958, p. 192). Shall we say that e
secret untold and intact? We self-ignorantly

who are ignorant of us and also self-ignoran
With these ideas, Arendt out-Emersons Em
it is open to a reader to think that by block
essence, Arendt is offering yet another ind
too much solitude and self-exploration, so t
world in which one can publicly appear to
know oneself becomes, after a point, futi
also tends to the futile, it is at least a palpa
beginning of something new whose outcome
in Malraux's concept (Arendt, 1994, p. 429
Arendt is being merely tactical. Though s
the world from abandonment, she also
devotion to the individual as one, as a world itself, as a new
world, a perishable world that should not vanish without a
trace. It is marvelous to see Arendt's profundity creating
obstacles in the way of regarding political action (even at its
ideal Greek best) as adequate to take the measure of humanity.
It is hard, as well, to suppress the feeling that a good part of
Arendt's profundity on the issues of identity and individualism
is nourished not only by Augustine but by modern existential-
ism, rather than by Greek literature.
There is one other theme related to individualism on which
the withheld writings throw light. That is the theme of

singularity, which figures in The Human Condition, but which is
treated perhaps even more interestingly in "Philosophy and
Politics." Singularity is an idea that is implicated in the
philosophical questions that mattered most to Arendt. The
contrasting term is plurality, Arendt's principal term and basic
synecdoche for political life. Singularity is thus nonpolitical;
maybe it is even antipolitical. It refers to the condition of
thinking that one is alone in the world, but not in the kind of
self-absorbed isolation that she claims Heidegger favors. One is
788 SOCIAL RESEARCH
alone in the sense that one raises oneself above the world and
beholds it in its entirety. One experiences the shock of wonder
that there is a world at all. The shock of wonder is selfless,
impersonal; and just as it disregards self, so it escapes all
confinement in particulars and localities that concern the self.
Wonder also goes beyond receptivity to all particulars, and the
attempt to see each as it is.
In "Philosophy and Politics," Arendt says:
The philosophical shock, moreover, strikes man in his singular-

ity, that is, neither in his equality with all others nor in his
absolute distinctness from them. In this shock, man in the
singular, as it were, is for one fleeting moment confronted with
the whole of the universe, as he will be confronted again only at
the moment of his death. He is to an extent alienated from the
city of men, which can only look with suspicion on everything
that concerns man in the singular (Arendt, 1990, p. 100).
These words are reminiscent of those moments in Emerson,

Thoreau, and Whitman where the consummation of demo-
cratic individuality is described as an impersonal ecstasy
occasioned by the shock of wonder at being. The Emersonians
labor to encourage all individuals to have impersonal
moments. The resemblance is all the more interesting because
Arendt strikes a rare note in this essay. She seems to accept a
notion she reads in Plato's parable of the cave; namely, that all
persons, staring, as they must, at shadows on the wall, are
potential philosophers because they "love seeing for its own
sake" (Arendt, 1990, p. 96). Arendt thus makes a move in the
direction of democratizing wonder on a radically individual
(singular) basis. She is also much closer to the Emersonians
than to Plato when she chides Plato for thinking that there
could be an indefinite prolongation of the experience of
wonder, rather than contenting himself with the admission
that this experience could only be momentary, even if
recurrent. One cannot "develop into a way of life . . . what can
be only a fleeting moment or ... the flying spark of fire
between two flintstones" (Arendt, 1990, p. 101).
Wherever in her work they appear, Aren

wonder at existence in its entirety, wo
something rather than nothing at all, are
ing. Still, they are as it were slightly emba
a concern that wonder cannot supply fo
requisite attachment to the world that issues
the world is one's home. Arendt wants to overcome alienation
from the world. If for a few philosophers there can be no

better attachment, no better sense of home, than the wonder
of gratitude that there is a world rather than none at all, most
people need some other kind of attachment.
To side with philosophy against politics is to side with
singularity against not only plurality but also individuality. It is
to side with the world as such against a local and particular
home. But Arendt will not side with philosophy, unless it be
Socrates 'philosophical anti-philosophy.' Whatever Arendt's
own personal path, she expends her talent in the service of
theorizing the end of alienation for ordinary persons and their
coming to individuation agonistically among their equals. She
must defend politics; that is her contribution to the recovery of
human sanity.
As far as Arendt can ascertain, most people could never
transform wonder into a new attachment to the world. The
reason is best elaborated in "Philosophy and Politics."
Following Plato, she calls the shock of wonder at existence a
pathos, "something which is endured" (Arendt, 1990, p. 97).
The mass of ordinary persons (and most philosophers, too)
may know the shock, may feel it, but refuse to endure it
(Arendt, 1990, p. 99). It is scarcely endurable. It renders
speechless anyone who feels it deeply. How can a city go on if
everyone is transported, or on the verge? People crave speech;
which is to say, they crave doctrines, fixed and settled
meanings. But the only true words of speechless wonder are
questions, the unanswerable questions of cosmology, meta-
physics, and the human condition, not to mention the
unanswerable questions of identity. A few philosophers can
790 SOCIAL RESEARCH
live on a diet of questions, on inc

unsatisfactory thinking. But even
doctrines. The real thinker is unl
he or she is in possession of speci
"he remains always ready to endur
thereby avoids the dogmatism
(Arendt, 1990, p. 101).
If the experience of singularity,
the shock of wonder, is not de
persons, many philosophers cov
wonder and hence refuse to endu
Cartesian revolution of doubt, ne
the tactic of subjectivist philosoph
their senses, retreat inwardly in
existence. Existential thinkers, li
that Being is Nothing or Nothing
arbitrarily proceed to create ex n
Fury grows out of the passion of
alienation. Even Kierkegaard in
never relates to any particular th
no-thing, of nothingness" (Aren
retains wonder as he converts th
into nothingness; but his wonder i
admiration and affirmation, but
nausea (Arendt, 1978, pp. 147-4
philosophies, which theorize or dis
do so only because they claim to
the universe. As for Plato, his won
contemplation of an invisible world
existentialist individuality, in the
regularly compromised. If philo
profess it without gratitude or ecs
ordinary persons?
I do not say that in her early post-
to Heidegger. I believe that in him
wonder is most genuine when it is
doctrine of theology or metaphysics. At

Nietzsche into an unsponsored world of d
Arendt's own reflections on wonder are, fro
indebted to Heidegger. Under the best
existence and the world, Being is, precise
isn't nothing or nothingness.) The shock
greater when one acknowledges no source f
reason for it. Gratitude is felt but not to a
real trouble is that the shock of wonder,
non-theistic and non-metaphysical reaso
posed to take seriously oneself as a person
and desirous of finding or forging one's
among equals. Anxiety marks Arendt's di
gerian Gelassenheit, the "Will-not-to-will," i
volume of The Life of the Mind. She is in
"cannot be transformed into any activity
even the activity of thought, which goes on
means of words, is obviously not only ina
but would interrupt and ruin the experie
1958, p. 20). Wonder can lead to an abdic
intellectual wilfulness (the wilfulness of en
subjectivism or existentialism) but of the v
in glorious worldly political enterprises wit
To praise the shock of wonder is somethin
But she can praise it only with circumspe
tion. She seems to avoid asking how wonder
it as an always latent possibility that someh
philosophers, here and there. Could it be th
by the thought that alienation from one's w
in the emergence of wonder? She certain
associate wonder with alienation because s
derives alienation from resentment at the human condition.
Resentment at the world's constitution could never lead to the
shock of wonder. Alienation, however, may derive from

something altogether different- sad disappointment with
792 SOCIAL RESEARCH
oneself and one's society. This sort

as distinct from the moderate al
individuals in response to the un
everyday life, and that should n
alienation knows that neither self
all it could or should be. One retreats into oneself in order to
heal oneself, and to disperse the Silenian thoughts that it
would have been best never to be born. Searching for
consolation, for reconciliation, one cannot find it in oneself or
one's society. One may find it, if one finds it at all, first in the
beauty of appearances, of surfaces, and, then, at last, in the
fact of "mere being" (to use Santayana's phrase from The Sense
of Beauty). One progresses from being an alienated individual
to being, in moments, an impersonal and deindividualized
singularity. The fact of mere being (the being of being)
registers as a shock, the shock of wonder. Disappointed (not
resentful) alienation can turn into gratitude for the world in its
entirety.
I suspect that the persons most likely to feel this shock are
those who have first determined to think of themselves as
individuals- as sufficiently detached to judge and to find
things badly wanting; and who then may proceed from
disappointment to alienation and then to wonder. Praising
wonder may entail praising alienation of a certain kind.
Perhaps Arendt thought so. Towards the end of the
unpublished "On the Nature of Totalitarianism," she says:
"Nothing is more difficult and rarer than [the experience of]
people who, out of the desperate need of loneliness, find the
strength to escape into solitude, into company with themselves,
thereby mending the broken ties which link them to other
men" (Arendt, 1994, p. 359). Arendt instances Nietzsche at a
particular moment in his life. Of course, the pattern I have just
mentioned is not exactly the same as the one Arendt sees in
Nietzsche and a few others (probably including herself). But
there are similarities. In any case, Arendt does praise the shock
of wonder- she has done as much as anyone except for
Heidegger, in this century, to keep it alive-

guardedly, as I have said.
Here we reach the most important lim
openness to any sort of individualism ot
individualism, whether in writings she ch
withhold. Any individualism that dimini
action or that finds a good word to say for
under suspicion. The dangers of nihili
misunderstanding, are too great (Aren
Ordinary persons must not be dissuaded
philosophy, not even by wonder, from a co
citizenship, should they be lucky enough to
position to begin it. Most of us, to love the w
allowed to love just our part of it, our
struggle between the best and the good, Ar
good.
Notes:
1 I am grateful to Professor Kohn for making "Philosophy and

Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought After the French
Revolution" available to me. Some themes of this paper are discussed
in Canovan, 1990. For a different kind of discrepancy from those I
discuss in this paper, see Canovan, 1992, pp. 135-38. Canovan shows
that in some unpublished work before and after The Human
Condition, Arendt rejected the idea that the daily political life of the
polis was a true case of political action.
In thinking about Arendt and individualism I learned much from
conversations with Dana Villa and from his book, The Fate of the
Political (forthcoming).
2 Students of Arendt are greatly indebted to Professor Kohn for
his editorial work in publishing this volume, as well as for initially
publishing "Philosophy and Politics."
Bibliography:
Arendt, Hannah, "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action

and Thought After the French Revolution" (unpublished, 1954).
794 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Cond

Chicago Press, 1958).
Arendt, Hannah, "Thinking and
Research 38:3 (1971): 417-446.
Arendt, Hannah, Rahel Varnhagen: Th
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974).
Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind
Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1978).
Arendt, Hannah, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990):
73-103.
Arendt, Hannah, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, Jerome Kohn,
ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
Canovan, Margaret, "Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt's
Reflections on Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990):
135-165.
Canovan, Margaret, Hannah Arendt: A Remterpretation of Her Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Villa, Dana, The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, forthcoming).

Arendt and Individualism PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Arendt and Individualism PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Arendt and Individualism

Author(s): GEORGE KATEB

1 he recent publication of hitherto unpublish

I experienced both these effects in reading the part of

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1994)

the Mind. Just by itself, the pri

"Philosophy and Politics" is a marvelous fragment. It is rich

Universe" (Arendt, 1954, p. 3), politica

103), a project that she was to d

Her famous work is a philosophy that wars on philosophy (as

to share (let us call it) the possibility of wo

In "Philosophy and Politics," Arendt's em

releasing the opinion or doxa that every individual carries bu

the possibility that public life can

'communication'- the term as we

But she does not make this crit

in a polis whose life consisted of an intense and uninterrupted

The praise of Socrates' citizenly mission corresponds to a

the attainment of truth. Truthful indi

only partly Greek and mostly Nietzschean. (As Heidegge

the thought she published earlie

who try to influence one another: her concept of doxa implies

explicitly say. No wonder she withheld

Yet bearing diverse doxai, citizens can become friends. Each

In Arendt's view, the chief cr

condition for the good functioning of the p

Now, Arendt does say in "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"

this point; Arendt does not elabor

inner life is shaped by Socrates' inner voice of negation and

say that his inner voice came to him from

Arendt's defense of solitude

pliancy to become anything else, so long

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper

The essay ends, however, not wit

standing of the world mutually intensify ea

only after he is dead" (Arendt,

(Arendt, 1994, pp. 359-60). We can answ

to the idea of individualism and despite her permanent

salient) published pieces make a g

I have said that some of the writings Arendt chose not to

own good --ultimately, one's immortal f

cordial to infinitude than Rahel

secret untold and intact? We self-ignorantly

There is one other theme related to individualism on which

the withheld writings throw light. That is the theme of

The philosophical shock, moreover, strikes man in his singular-

These words are reminiscent of those moments in Emerson,

Wherever in her work they appear, Aren

from the world. If for a few philosophers there can be no

live on a diet of questions, on inc

doctrine of theology or metaphysics. At

shock of wonder. Alienation, however, may derive from

oneself and one's society. This sort

Heidegger, in this century, to keep it alive-

1 I am grateful to Professor Kohn for making "Philosophy and

Arendt, Hannah, "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Cond

Вам также может понравиться